So I apologise for the lack of photos in this post.
Since my last post I’ve travelled through Andorra, a little bit of Spain and I’m now in Portugal.
I caught a bus from Toulouse to Andorra la Vella, the capital of the tiny country in the Pyrenees Mountains. Unfortunately the bus left Toulouse at seven in the evening, so the view of the Pyrenees wasn’t very good. But as we climbed higher and higher, I could see snow on the ground; patchy at first and then quite thick. The bus had a thermometer which showed the outside temperature. It was about 16 degrees when I left Toulouse. The temperature kept dropping as we got higher, it eventually got down to zero! I was in jeans and a t-shirt which was fine for Toulouse, but I had no idea how cold it would be! Luckily Andorra la Vella is in a valley, so it warmed up to a balmy seven degrees by the time we went descended.
Andorra la Vella is a weird, weird city. From what I can gather it makes a living from skiing and flogging duty free crap. The city kind of feels like Thredbo, and there’s just not a lot going on. I wanted to head up the Pyrenees to try to do a day hike, but the day I had to do it was a Sunday and the buses out of the city were very infrequent, so I spent the day wandering around the city and catching up on sleep. I wish I had gotten out of the city to see the mountains by daylight. It may have made me feel warmer about the place.
Oh yeh, and it turns out Andorra is not where the blue guys with antennae from Star Trek come from. Who knew.
From there I went to Barcelona. Now, pretty much everyone I’ve talked to about travelling Europe has said two cities, Barcelona and Berlin, are amazing and won’t disappoint me. So that’s putting a lot of pressure on. I did like Barcelona, but I didn’t love it. Maybe people set expectations that were too high? I was also staying in a ‘party hostel’, which is fine; I’m not old enough to take exception to those young rascals yet, but one or two big nights out is enough for me in a city. I’ve never really loved night clubs, and to be honest, they play the same music as clubs in Australia, which I don’t like, and the drinks are super expensive. So not so much my thing.
But Barcelona is an undeniably pretty city. Of course the famous site is La Sagrada Familia, which was designed by Antoni Gaudi. Construction started 150 years ago, and is expected to finish in maybe another 30. It’s a crazy, beautiful, bizarre building. I’m not sure what Gaudi was smoking when he came up with the idea for it. And he was able to work out how to build it so the structure could take the load of the towers using a completely new modelling method – building the thing upside down out of chains and weighed down the highest points, which were the lowest point in the upside down model. That was the same as putting weight on model standing the right way up, and allowed Gaudi to work out how to support the weight of the building. Clever bloke.
Other than that, Barcelona has a very nice city centre, pretty beaches and a great food market, where you can get fresh seafood cooked right in front of you. I also went to the city’s Picasso museum, which was very interesting. It had works from his entire life, from learning to paint traditionally, to the Blue Period, to full on Cubism.
From Barcelona I caught a cheap and slow train to Valencia. I loved this city! I was staying in a hostel right in the middle of town, and I just met some interesting people, went out to celebrate a birthday and had fun ‘partying’ (they thought it was funny that I hate to use the word party as a verb). One of the people I met was a hairdresser, so I was able to get a trim for €5 – bargain! Valencia a beautiful city with lovely old buildings and just amazing to walk around. On my way to the bus station I found this group of people dancing old time swing in a little square. They plugged a speaker in at a café on the square, would drink beer between songs and just dance and have a good time. You’ve got to love a city where people are quite literally dancing in the streets.
I was, however, disappointed to learn via Wikipedia that the Valencia orange was in fact developed in a lab in California and has never been grown in Spain. This does lead to the question of what sort of oranges are actually grown near Valencia, because there’s certainly plenty of orchards around.
After pondering that question for a while I headed to Madrid. It’s an amazing city, with a great street culture, bustling squares, beautiful buildings and monuments. Even the roundabouts have amazing sculptures in the middle of them. For example, from what I could work out, this is the headquarters of Spain’s main telecommunications company. It’s amazing. Take that Telstra.
Many hostels I’ve been staying in have offered walking tours around whatever city I’ve been in. I’ve tended to avoid them, but for whatever reason I did one in Madrid, and now I can see that they’re actually not a bad idea. You get a bit of a feel for where everything is, learn about some of the history of the city, and sometimes find things you probably wouldn’t by yourself.
This is the square where about 2,500 people were killed during the Spanish Inquisition. There’s some artwork at the base of the light posts in the square to commemorate this. It’s kind of eerie to think about that while standing there. I had a similar experience standing in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where the French Revolution killed the King and Queen, amongst many others.
The walking tour also meant we could go inside what is claimed to be the oldest continuously run restaurant in the world. They have a Guinness Book of World Records certificate to prove it too! Apparently they’re famous for suckling pig, but at €40 per person it was a splurge too far for me. Still, it was interesting to see the oven they’ve been using for almost 300 years.
Against the advice of my father (because I’m a rebel) I went along to a bullfight. The arena is kind of amazing to look at from the outside and the inside.
I was unsure about whether I would go to a bullfight. I was curious, but had read that it is very cruel to the animals. Now, I’ve been living in the Northern Territory for the last two years, so, you know, those tofu-eating-Greens-voting-hairy-armpitted-wankers can go to whatever Richard Dawkins inspired atheist version of hell they choose (Catholic mass?).
It was interesting to watch the bull fight, and the atmosphere is amazing. It’s a 25,000 seat bull ring which was full to capacity. It started raining and was cold, but no one left until it was over.
But is it cruel? Undoubtedly. It starts off with about six guys waving pink rags at the beast as it runs all around the arena trying to gore them. These guys run away behind the fence a lot of the time, and then another one attracts it to the other side of the ring. I’m guessing this is done to tire him out. Then a dude on a horse with a lance comes in and spears the bull kind of right between the shoulders twice. I don’t know a lot about bull anatomy, but I’m willing to bet this is a crucial area to hit. The bull starts bleeding heavily. Then they run him around a bit to get the blood flowing, which weakens him. After that two guys stick these weird kind of colourful things into his back. I’ve been told they aim for tendons, which further saps his strength. Then the last matador takes his red rag and a sword and runs him around even more until it’s obvious the bull is absolutely exhausted. He barely charges by the time the guy finally puts him out of his misery with a sword stroke to the neck. That’s if it goes well, which it didn’t in at least three fight that night, which required another couple of goes.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a pansy nor necessarily philosophically opposed to blood sports. I think my main objection is that it’s not actually a bullfight, it’s a bull massacre. I could be more into it if it was like one guy with a knife and no rag to distract the bull. That seems sporting. I mean, I guess it takes some balls (which I mean in a universal and non-gender specific way) to wave the rag and let the thing charge at you. But the bull never even seems interested in going for the guy; the matadors know they can keep him away from them easily. So I don’t go in for the bravery or nobility of the matadors.
But still, overall I’ll claim it as a cultural experience. And it was as good a place to drink beer and eat pistachios as any.
After Madrid I went to Salamanca on my way to Porto in Portugal. I only stayed for a night, and arrived late in the day, but it is a beautiful old sandstone university town, with an amazing Cathedral. But there are just amazing old buildings everywhere.
So right now I’m in Portugal, but I will save more about that for a later post.
I’ve been travelling a bit faster lately for a couple of reason. Firstly, while I have a 12 month German working holiday visa, I haven’t actually had it stamped yet. At Charles de Gaulle airport I got the standard 90 day Schengen zone stay stamp in my passport. My plan is to head back into Spain then catch a ferry to Morroco, which is out of the EU, then fly to Berlin to get my 12 month visa stamped. I have no idea whether I actually need to do that, but I don’t want to push my luck. So I have to leave the EU on June the 16th at the lastest.
The second reason I’ve been going a bit faster is because I’ve been here for three months already, which is hard to believe! The limiting factors on my stay are visas and money, and I sort of realised that if I travel through everywhere at the pace I went through France I won’t get to see everything I want to. So it’s become a quality v quantity debate. I’ve never been attracted to whistle stop tours, and loved the time I spent in France. But I think there is room to move around a little bit faster than I did without compromising too much on the quality side. It’s a shame though, as already there are things that I had to decide not to do which I would have liked to. But I guess it’s about prioritising things that I absolutely want to do over things that are kind of interesting.
Anyway, I loved the parts of Spain I’ve seen so far and am looking forward to heading back after I explore Portugal for a while.
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